Press Pages = Linktrade?

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Killah

9:49 am on Nov 4, 2013 (gmt 0)

One of our clients figured out that hundreds of press articles and news sites link to his website. So he wants to add a page where everybody can see that so many good websites write about his company. What this page will do in terms of seo is to turn hundreds of one way links into link trades. So I recommended to drop that idea. This is however a common problem, so I was wondering which solution you would suggest if your customer asks for such a press-mirror-page that links back to all articles and news about him. I came up with 2 possible solutions, one is a bit grey/black: - Show the URL of the Article as text but not linking it to the article. - putting the press-page on a different domain and integrate it 100% design-wise into the website.

How would you handle it?

turbocharged

12:00 pm on Nov 4, 2013 (gmt 0)

Use disallow in robots.txt file to exclude that page from being crawled and add noindex meta tag to the page just to be safe. Problem solved.

Killah

1:12 pm on Nov 4, 2013 (gmt 0)

If I was Google, I would put no follow links somehow into my algo for tracking different types of link trades to lower the value of them.

netmeg

1:28 pm on Nov 4, 2013 (gmt 0)

Some of my sites get a lot of press; I link back to the really good interviews or stories without thinking about it. The one or two line mentions, I don't bother with. And I clean out the old ones periodically.

Killah

1:32 pm on Nov 4, 2013 (gmt 0)

Sorry, I meant (also) noindex. It's just a rule... The Google robot is not locked out like using a password to protect a site. Fighting linkbuilding might require breaking their own rules to figure out what's going on.

diberry

5:25 pm on Nov 4, 2013 (gmt 0)

On some sites, I maintain a "press page" with a paragraph at the top on how these are some of the websites which have found my site useful or valuable. That's a standard thing to do in business from before the web existed, so I'd be surprised if Google misinterpreted it (and I don't believe they have in my case). The trick is to make it clear that it's more thought-through than, say, little blogs adding one another to their sidebar blogrolls way back when.

But if that still makes you nervous, noindex really should work. It lets Google know your intention with this page has nothing to do with them. It doesn't transfer link juice. It doesn't benefit you in Google, it just shows your visitors that others find you useful. Though I personally like to have these pages indexed so they can show up as sitelinks - sometimes visitors are impressed and become more likely to click through when they see these pages.